MMO game design

[kneeride]

****Disclaimer: I'm not making an MMO!! So, please don't get the wrong idea with this post

I however am interesting in how MMOs might solve a number of problems that may arise in multiplayer games. I personally don't have enough time to play these games so I'm wondering is you guys could offer some advice or even describe how some games have solved these problems.

Problem 1: A user logs in but the area has already been cleared by other users.
Solutions:
1. Respawn the content,
2. Create a new / clean instance of the level for the user to enter

Problem 2: Veterans targetting rookies - I think this one can be a tricky one. A lot of gamers would enjoy beating up on the new guys to show off or test their skills with an unfair advantage.
Solutions:
1. Create separate instances for skill level. ie Rookies to zone 1, Veterans to zone 2.
2. Try and encourage the 'community' to protect the noobs from unfair battles. I think WOW encourages this. Veterans rock up when there's injustice.
3. Safe areas for noobs to relax

Problem 3: You design the game to support X amount of people across the map (to avoid exhausting network/cpu/gpu/server resources), however they all decide to hang out in the same area!
Solutions:
1. Encourage some players to move elsewhere (carrot on a stick)
2. Multiple game instances for an area. So if 100 people in the area and area can support only 50, then 2 instances created

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this

[Klaim]

I'm not a big MMO player myself but I study a lot of game design so I might help.

Problem 1: A user logs in but the area has already been cleared by other users.
Solutions:
1. Respawn the content,
2. Create a new / clean instance of the level for the user to enter

Both solutions and some others are possible in the same game. 1. is often used in open spaces, 2. is basically the effect of having an instance system, that is for example a dungeon that is generated on demand for a player and his team. Then when some monsters die in the dungeon they can't be respawned, but if the instance is ended and another instance of the same dungeon is started then there is another same monster.

Among other alternatives: PVP only contexts (like Eve Online) where everything is depending on what the players do, so no respawn but if some players manage to setup a similar system, then it's possible.

Problem 2: Veterans targetting rookies - I think this one can be a tricky one. A lot of gamers would enjoy beating up on the new guys to show off or test their skills with an unfair advantage.
Solutions:
1. Create separate instances for skill level. ie Rookies to zone 1, Veterans to zone 2.
2. Try and encourage the 'community' to protect the noobs from unfair battles. I think WOW encourages this. Veterans rock up when there's injustice.
3. Safe areas for noobs to relax

1. is never used because it limit the potential of "being with others" that this kind of game offer. 2 cannot work if most of your audience is teenagers (they tend to try everything possible) but might be possible if your audience is mostly very adult, so it's too rare.
3 have been used but don't fix the problem really.
Another far better alternatives:
- not allowing PVP : simple and efficient, but depending on the kind of game it can be a problem
- not allowing PVP on some servers: that way the player choose to be exposed or not as a newbie, the problem being that then can he move his character from one server to another? most of the time no...
- not allowing PVP until the level (or whatever gives the power of the character) match or is near : that way PVP is possible only if players are about the same levels
- not allowing PVP but if both players want to do it: that way it's more like a duel and it can be possible only if both player want to do it - and no other players

There are other ways to do it. Eve online have an in-world "safe place" that is protected by an AI, so you can stay there but at any moment you can move out of this area.

Problem 3: You design the game to support X amount of people across the map (to avoid exhausting network/cpu/gpu/server resources), however they all decide to hang out in the same area!
Solutions:
1. Encourage some players to move elsewhere (carrot on a stick)
2. Multiple game instances for an area. So if 100 people in the area and area can support only 50, then 2 instances created

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this

This is hard technical problem. I know that Eve online have a very special architecture that can be sumed up like this: each area is it's own server. That way they can scale up the power of the server of a specific area when events make players go there all together at the same time. That allow them to get epic space battles involving multi-thouthand armies fighting in the same place. There are some articles explaining that somewhere, you should be able to find them on gamasutra.com

[Zonder]

Problem 3

Some games use phases to handle this so say a server can handle 1000 people when it hits say 800 it spawns a new server and adds people to there instead. But players can phase to another player in the same area which effectively swaps server if they need to be in the same area.

In the case of WOW it used to just crash the server if lots of people entered iron forge can't remember what they did to fix it.

[Kojack]

Asheron's Call handled crowded areas with Portal Storms. When the number of players in a town reaches a certain level, players receive the message "A portal storm is forming". The server would pick people and teleport them in a random direction and distance.

AC also had no instances. You could go into a dungeon and find it cleared out. Monsters would respawn after a certain time, and chests would resupply. In a busy dungeon there would be a physical line of people waiting to take turns on boss fights. Line jumping couldn't be stopped, but it would piss off large numbers of people and could give your monarchy a bad name.
Entering a dungeon only to find it cleared was actually quite dangerous. Without knowing how long it was since the monsters were killed, you could end up going too deep in and suddenly having a room full of enemies spawn on you. Since monsters had collision volumes and could block your movement (unlike the crappy way games like wow have all monsters as effectively ghosts) and fighting involved careful positioning to maximise shield effect and limit enemy numbers, unexpected spawns were far more dangerous than normal.

[kneeride]

great tips guys.

I find the idea of queueing up to kill a boss a funny thought. It's like tourists lining up to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre - someone could stand at the door and charge entry!

[Kojack]

Asheron's Call also punished player death by dropping behind some of your items on your corpse. You'd have to get back to it to recover the items. It would pick the number based on your level, then pick the items based on value, with the most expensive dropping first. It would try to spread the kind of items over several categories, so if it dropped a weapon it would try to avoid dropping another weapon (but still could, based on value).
The corpse would be inaccessible to anybody other than the owner, but only for a time limit (something like 20min + 1min per level). After that it fades away and leaves all of it's items behind for anyone to take. It also drops it's items for the public if you die while trying to loot your own body (you can have multiple corpses at once, but only the most recent is protected from looting).

This means that when you enter a dungeon there's a chance that you'll find someone's most valuable items sitting on the ground because they couldn't get back to their body in time (it's a massive world). If you saw the body name before it faded, you could message the person and return their stuff, or just keep it for yourself.
Instanced dungeons in other games make that kind of event impossible.

[Klaim]

great tips guys.

I find the idea of queueing up to kill a boss a funny thought. It's like tourists lining up to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre - someone could stand at the door and charge entry!

Might be fun for you but not for the player who have to wait, while he paid the full month to play and have to wait to really play.

That's why it's not done that way anymore.

[Kojack]

That's why it's not done that way anymore.

Except it is.
Not all of WOW takes place in instanced dungeons, outdoor areas are shared and if you try to do an outside quest (like kill a certain number of things) but other people are there then you may have to wait. Asheron's Call just did this for indoor areas too.

You could also run into people in trouble and lend them a hand, then continue on. It just had a better feel than the mmo-outdoor / mo-indoor instanced style of today, the world was more alive.

There was one dungeon that became really popular. At the very bottom there was a room with a ton of portals that connected all over the game world. It was nicknamed Subway. It became so popular that people set up trade bots in the first room of the dungeon and it became a market place (the creator of the trade bot was hired by Turbine). The bottom room with the portals could only be reached by jumping down a really deep hole that would kill most low level players, so others would help them out with buffs so they would have a better chance. I used to hang around in subway unlocking doors and killing the undead in there to make it easier and safer for other people who were just passing through.
None of that is possible with instanced dungeons.

(I could go on and on about AC for hours, it rocked. I'll try to stop talking about it, but it will be a struggle)

[Klaim]

That's why it's not done that way anymore.

Except it is.
Not all of WOW takes place in instanced dungeons, outdoor areas are shared and if you try to do an outside quest (like kill a certain number of things) but other people are there then you may have to wait. Asheron's Call just did this for indoor areas too.

AFAIK Wow have really quick respawn time so it is not really a problem and there is no queue...right? (not been playing for a long time)

[Kojack]

I've had to leave areas in wow because too many other people were there already. Although it's been years since I played it.

AC had quick respawn times too (few minutes), a massive map and not that many people active at any one time per server (maybe 4000-10000), so it's not like you hang around for hours waiting for a quest item.

My favourite character on AC was an unarmed fighter/mage. Unarmed fighting actually uses weapons, but they are punching weapons like the cestus, nekode and katar. I typically carried 14 weapons with me at all times. This is because there's 7 damage types (bludgeon, pierce, slash, fire, frost, lightning, acid) that a weapon can do, and every monster had different vulnerabilities. I'd have two weapons of each damage type, one that had great stats for when I was playing solo, and a second that was better for when I was accompanied by a mage with high level item magic (my item magic was only around level 4 out of 7). Before solo combat I had a series of around 38 buff spells I'd apply. It would take 20 minutes for a macro program to apply them in rapid order (because some were so hard to cast that the program would need to retry them for several minutes before they succeeded), and most spells only lasted 30min. So I'd get in maybe 10min of fighting before spells would start to run out. I'd push that though, I'd keep fighting until enough buffs had run out that I could no longer handle the enemies (I usually took on enemies above my level). Then I'd try to escape (remember, monsters had collision, they could block you in a corner). Fun times.

Of course I didn't need to do all that, I could have fought things around my level or gone with a group. But with enough magic I could become a solo killing machine for around 10min.

[kneeride]

Hi guys,

I thought quick respawns could be a problem. I can imagine I'd get frustrated cruising around a dungeon, then having to backtrack for some reason to only find the rooms that were cleared filled again with monsters. it *edit* could *edit* also encourage farming where players would just do a continuous circuit to rack up XP.

RE the dungeon instancing or phasing - if there was a friend system, a trick could be to send the player to the instance with the most friends. this would be an attempt to keep friends together. Of course this wouldnt work in all situations since friends could be split across instances

[Zonder]

not all mmos are about killing for experience its about questing

[kneeride]

Sorry Zonder, i meant to say "it could encourage XP farming." (instead of couldn't) - This is something i wouldnt be in favour of

[Kojack]

encourage farming where players would just do a continuous circuit to rack up XP

Oh definitely. AC didn't have a Wow style quest structure back in the early days. I'd spend hours in a place like the lugian citadel or the olthoi pincer hives just killing stuff.
Even so, it took something like 2 years before the first player hit the level cap (level 126 originally).
To slow down some of the quest farming, timers were used. My favourite passtime in the later years was the olthoi pincer hives. There were around 5 hives of increasing difficulty. At the bottom of each there was a chance of an olthoi dropping a special pincer item. Returning it to a special npc gave a heap of rewards. But each grade of pincer could only be picked up once every 21 days.

A lot of xp was purely from killing. You could also get xp from your vassals. Instead of a simple guild with a leader and a heap of members, AC had monarchies. You could swear allegiance to one other player (your "patron"), and up to 10 people (your "vassals") could swear to you. A monarch was the head of a tree hierarchy. A percentage of all the xp you earn is passed up to your patron (based on your loyalty skill and his leadership skill). I was in a tiny monarchy, we only had 600 members.

Ok, I'll try to stop going on and on about AC. Final bit that rocked: every month for the entire lifetime of the game, there would be an event patch. The storyline would advance, new content was added, the world would change. They once wiped out one of the popular towns, a huge smouldering crater was all that was left, and the npcs had set up tents down the road. There was a high level story arc that took place over years.

[lingfors]

I'll drop some knowledge about my experiences from EVE, since that's the MMO I have the most experience from.

Problem 1: A user logs in but the area has already been cleared by other users.
Solutions:
1. Respawn the content,
2. Create a new / clean instance of the level for the user to enter

EVE used what I would call "semi-instances". What I mean is, when you did a mission, it spawned everything in space opened for anyone. However, in EVE, you can't go anywhere you want, you can only warp to celestial bodies, space stations, and bookmarks. So whenever you did a mission, your agent gave you a bookmark to that area. But since noone else had that bookmark, it was practically your own instance.

Of course, there was ways around it if someone wanted to find you, mainly probes. When I started playing, probes were very difficult to use efficiently though. You placed three probes (and after they were dropped, they couldn't be moved), and you could find stuff located in the plane created by those three probes. However, since most systems had their planets located roughly in the same plane, that meant you could only find stuff in the plane created by the planets using probes. Missions, however, could be (and almost always were) located outside of that plane. So it was basically impossible to locate people using probes back then.

However, around a year or so before I quit playing, they changed the probing mechanics. Instead of placing three probes, you placed four. And you could also move them around in space independently of your ship. Basically, once you had learned the mecanics, it became very easy to probe stuff (including other players) down. Of course, as a player, you could scan for the probes, and if you moved to a new location in space the old probing results were useless. But missions (especially the higher ones) usually took 30-60 minutes to complete, and you didn't move while in the mission. So basically, people doing missions became very easy to probe down.

Problem 2: Veterans targetting rookies - I think this one can be a tricky one. A lot of gamers would enjoy beating up on the new guys to show off or test their skills with an unfair advantage.
Solutions:
1. Create separate instances for skill level. ie Rookies to zone 1, Veterans to zone 2.
2. Try and encourage the 'community' to protect the noobs from unfair battles. I think WOW encourages this. Veterans rock up when there's injustice.
3. Safe areas for noobs to relax

Like someone else already said (I think), EVE had different security levels, basically 3 levels for player protection.

Levels 1.0 - 0.5 was the highest security. If you as much as shot another player (outside your own corporation), a bunch of very strong AI ships would spawn and kill your ship. This was unavoidable by design. Actually, if you somehow managed to get away with your ship intact after shooting at another player, it was viewed as an exploit.

Levels 0.4 - 0.1 was low security space. If you shot another player here, no AI would spawn and kill you. However, you would get a 15 minute criminal timer. Space stations and stargates (the mechanic through which you moved between different systems) were protected by a kind of stationary guns which would at least seriously hurt even bigger ships such as battleships, and they would shoot at anyone with a criminal timer active. Of course, this was "exploitable" (i.e. not a game mechanic exploit that could get you banned or punished) - if multiple people approached a gate or a station with a criminal timer, the guns would spread their fire between the different ships, thus making it easier to tank.

Finally, the lowest security space was the dreaded 0.0. Here, there was no AI protection, not even station or gate guns. There was no criminal timer if you shot at other players, not even if you blew up their ships or "podded" them. ("Podding" was called such, because if your ship was blown up, you didn't die. Instead, your body was ejected in a protective pod. You could use it to escape the wreck of your blown-up ship, to go to a station and pick up a new ship. However, this pod could of course also be blown up, costing the victim the purchase of a new clone (which you needed to keep all of your skill points in case your old clone was killed), as well as any skill-enhancing implants that clone might have had. A clone for a character with a lot of skill points obviously costa lot of money, so it wasn't something you wanted to purchase on a weekly basis. And good implants cost many times more than the clone. So obviously, managing to pod someone was very fun, especielly if it was a character you could suspect having an expensive clone and expensive implants.)

Problem 3: You design the game to support X amount of people across the map (to avoid exhausting network/cpu/gpu/server resources), however they all decide to hang out in the same area!
Solutions:
1. Encourage some players to move elsewhere (carrot on a stick)
2. Multiple game instances for an area. So if 100 people in the area and area can support only 50, then 2 instances created

Unfortunately, I think most MMOs will have this problem. In EVE, there was around 5000 systems spread out over 30 or so regions. Whenever you wanted to buy something, you could only see the market for the region you were in. Obviously, you're not going to go through 30 different regions just to find the best deal. So, different market hubs appeared. Especially one: Jita.

Jita was basically the one place where you knew you could find whatever you wanted. So everybody went there to buy. And since everybody went there to buy, everybody also went there to sell. It was awful. No, it was worse than awful. It was hell. It regularly had the maximum number of players that the server could manage for one system. I remember it having 800 people way back when I started playing. When I stopped playing, it had 1300 or so logged in. This for a game that peaked at around 40 000 - 50 000 simultaneously logged in players spread across 5000 systems. That's an average of 10 players per system...

Of course, this meant Jita (and other systems having this amount of people in it for other reasons) sometimes crashed (i.e. the physical server running that particular system crashed and had to be rebooted).

Of course, CCP (the company behind EVE) did their best to avoid this. Apart from the general optimizations they did to increase the maximum amount of people a system could support, they also took other measures. For instance, they could shut down gates going into congested areas. Alliance leaders could notify CCP about where they suspected large battles would take place, allowing CCP to allocating more resources for those systems. Etc.

[Nauk]

Problem 1: A user logs in but the area has already been cleared by other users.
Solutions:
1. Respawn the content,
2. Create a new / clean instance of the level for the user to enter

I would definately go for respawn. Instancing is a very ugly habit and workaround WOW introduced to avoid social tensions between players fighting over content. Cutting down the costs on GMs dealing with the disputes.
Something I always considered a workaround, instead of tackling the problem by game policies and proper community maintainance. In good old EQ players established their own moral code for that which worked fine
mostly, if SOE would have adapted to them and inforced them too, it would have been perfect. Respawn timers is also a good lever for that, Rift demonstrates that very well.

Problem 2: Veterans targetting rookies - I think this one can be a tricky one. A lot of gamers would enjoy beating up on the new guys to show off or test their skills with an unfair advantage.
Solutions:
1. Create separate instances for skill level. ie Rookies to zone 1, Veterans to zone 2.
2. Try and encourage the 'community' to protect the noobs from unfair battles. I think WOW encourages this. Veterans rock up when there's injustice.
3. Safe areas for noobs to relax

See my answer to 1. about instancing. I am assuming you refer to PVP. Good MMO immersion is achieved by establishing as little limits as possible, instead you can enforce good moral conduct by consquences
in the game world. For example high levels killing low levels resulting in faction loss for the offender for unfair behaviour aka cyber crime leading NPCs reacting hostile, merchants asking higher prices, guards attacking or helping
the lowbie, etc etc. You get the picture, there are many creative ways to establish and solidify a moral code via gameplay.

Problem 3: You design the game to support X amount of people across the map (to avoid exhausting network/cpu/gpu/server resources), however they all decide to hang out in the same area!
Solutions:
1. Encourage some players to move elsewhere (carrot on a stick)
2. Multiple game instances for an area. So if 100 people in the area and area can support only 50, then 2 instances created

Apart from what I already wrote about instancing, I would go for 3. Assign more server resources to that zone / area, make it technically possible and be happy about it, your game is good and popular enough to spawn a social hotspot. One classic example for that is Everquests "Tunnel" in East commonlands aka EC. Sony tried to take it away too and killed one of the most charming pillars of the game with it.

[joew]

The corpse would be inaccessible to anybody other than the owner, but only for a time limit (something like 20min + 1min per level).

Mind you it was that amount of time with the land block being active. The servers were dynamically load balanced and so if no players were on a block for X amount of time the process would spin down and sleep which is why if you died in some crazy remote location (say way up north running to get your hollow ore) sometimes your corpse would be there a few days later (assuming no server crashes / maintenance).